Elysse Morgan* says child care was the missing ingredient in the Federal Budget 2020 jobs plan.
The $320 million third stage of the Shepparton Rail Line Upgrade will install new signals, allowing trains to travel faster between the central Victorian city and Melbourne.
That single Budget announcement was also more new money than pledged by the Government on Tuesday night to help solve the key economic problems for women in Australia.
But, ironically, the Budget that contains very little for women has become all about women.
A lack of anything to improve the cost of child care and a jobs agenda that will largely benefit male workers led to howls of protest on social media from hundreds women and men under the hashtag #crediblewomen.
Labor steps into the void
The Labor Party read the room and made lowering the cost of child care the centrepiece of its Budget reply.
It is proposing to remove the $10,000 cap that kicks in at $180,000 combined income.
This cap has been one of the main reasons why (mostly) women limit the number of days they return to work.
At a $120-a-day average for full-time care, that only gets you 16 weeks.
At three days a week, that gets you 27 weeks.
Under Labor’s plan, the childcare subsidy cut-off would be raised from $365,000 to $530,000, and it proposes smoothing the tapering rate from its current line that looks like a city high rise to a straight line.
The changes, Labor says, will leave a household earning $70,000 better off by $600 a year, and a family on a combined income of $350,000 with an extra $2,900.
It comes with a pretty hefty price tag for the taxpayer though, at more than $1.5 billion a year.
However, the Grattan Institute estimates 54 per cent of families would pay less than $20-a-day per child under Labor’s plan.
By comparison, under the current system families pay roughly $50 a day.
Grattan estimates its benefit to GDP would be double the program’s cost.
How many jobs for women?
The Government has identified getting people back to work as fundamental to pulling the economy out of recession.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg pointed out in his speech that “women made up the majority of those who lost their jobs during this crisis”.
“We are determined to see female workforce participation reach its pre-COVID-19 record high.”
The Budget aims to create close to a million jobs — but how many of those will be women with children?
The unintentional outcome of policies aimed at restoring jobs in manufacturing, construction and infrastructure is that it leaves women out.
The $1.2 billion wage subsidy for apprentices is welcome, but it’s likely that 75 per cent of those who take it up will be men.
Child care garners just three short paragraphs in the Government’s 371-page Budget Paper One and no mention in its glossy Budget Overview document.
The Budget contains just $240.4 million over five years, or $48 million a year, for a Women’s Leadership and Development Program to support women’s job creation, a council to help address sexual harassment in the workplace, a mentoring program for female entrepreneurs and a $5 million-a-year program to assist 500 women into STEM.
‘Nothing in the Budget is gendered’
The Government says its Budget is for everyone, and that “nothing in the Budget is gendered”, but that perhaps is the problem.
The Abbott government scrapped the Women’s Budget Statement, which had been produced from 1983 to 2013, to scrutinise budgets’ impacts on women and girls.
The Government produced a new Women’s Economic Security Statement this year to sit alongside the Budget and it does highlight the challenges that women, particularly with children, face.
It states that 37 per cent of employed mothers with children under 12 years old work part-time, compared to five per cent of employed fathers, and that mothers spend 57 hours a week on unpaid housework and child care, while fathers spend 29 hours a week.
While it talks about the importance of getting more women into work, it doesn’t mention the cost of child care as the reason most commonly nominated by mothers for not doing more hours of paid work.
The Government’s changes to make child care free during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic were never going to last, but many hoped that there would be something.
Women’s participation in the workforce dropped throughout the pandemic due to exposure to the hardest-hit industries, higher levels of insecure work and children being kept home from school.
It’s now down around its long-term average of 59 per cent, and economists say it’s hard to see that improving significantly without more childcare support.
*Elysse Morgan hosts The Business on ABC TV and ABC NEWS Channel from Mondays to Thursdays.
This article first appeared at abc.net.au
